From Egypt to Japan. Field Henry Martyn

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СКАЧАТЬ in the gate" as "elders" to administer justice. The city gate is the place of honor and of justice now, as it was thousands of years ago.

      In the mountain behind the town are a great number of tombs, like those of Beni-Hassan, vast chambers hewn out of the rock ages ago for burial places. We walked along by these silent memorials of the mighty dead, to the summit, from which is one of the most beautiful views of the valley of the Nile. Below the plain is spread out for many miles, well watered like the garden of the Lord, the emerald green coming up to the very foot of the barren hills. But there it ceases instantly, giving place to the desert.

      These contrasts suggest some comparisons between the scenery and the climate of Egypt, and our own country. Whoever breathes this balmy air, and looks up to this cloudless sky, must feel that the Lord of all the earth has been bountiful to Egypt. As we read of the winter storms now raging over half of Europe, we bless the more kindly skies that are over us now. But after a few weeks of this dreamy, languid life, one begins to feel the want of something else to stir his blood. He finds that nature in Egypt, like the works of man, like the temples and the pyramids, is a sublime monotony. The landscapes are all the same. There are four or five grand features, the river, the valley, the hills that enclose it, and beyond the boundless desert, and over all the burning sun and sky. These are the elements that enter into every landscape. There is no change, no variety. Look where you will, there is no vision in the distance of lofty peaks dark with pines, or white with snow, no torrents leaping down the mountain side (the silence of Egypt is one of the things that most oppress me), no brooks that run among the hills, no winding paths along their banks that invite the stranger to lose himself in their shade. I see indeed hills on either horizon, but they are barren and desolate. On all this double range, for six hundred miles, there is not a single green thing – not a tree, not a shrub, not a blade of grass, not even a rock covered with moss, only a waste of sand and stone. If you climbed those hills yonder across the valley you would look off upon a boundless plain of sand that stretches to the Red Sea; while behind where we stand is the Libyan Desert, which is only an arm of the Great Sahara, that crosses almost the whole of the continent. In all this waste the valley of the Nile is the one narrow strip of fertility. And even this is parched and burnt up to the very water's edge. Hence the monotony of vegetation. There is not a forest in all Egypt, only the palm groves, which are planted like garden flowers, but no tangled wild wood, no lofty elms, no broad-spreading oaks that cast their grateful shadow on the burning plains. All that variety of nature, with which in other lands she beguiles the weary heart of man, is wanting here. It is indeed the land of the sun, and in that is at once its attraction and its terror, as the fiery orb beats down upon it, withering man and beast, and turning the earth into a desert.

      Seeing this monotony of nature, and feeling this monotony of life, one begins to pine after awhile, for a return to the scenes more varied, though more wild and rugged, of his own more northern clime. We hear much of the beauty of a "cloudless sky." It is indeed a relief for a few weeks to those who escape from wintry storms, from bitter winds and blinding snow. But who would have sunshine forever? The light and warmth are better when softened and subdued by clouds that intercept the overpowering rays. But here the clouds are few, and they do not "return after the rain," for there is no rain. In Lower Egypt there is what may be called a rainy season. In the Delta, as the clouds roll up from the Mediterranean, there is sometimes a sound of abundance of rain. But in Upper Egypt it may be said that it never rains. In Assiout it has rained but three times in ten years! Of course the heat is sometimes fearful. Now it is mid-winter, and the air is comparatively cool and bracing, but in midsummer it reaches 110 and 112 degrees in the shade! For days and nights together the heat is so intense that not a leaf stirs in the palm groves. Not only is there not a drop of rain – there is not a breath of air. This it is to have a "cloudless sky"! Gladly then would our friend exchange for half the year the climate of Egypt for that of America. How refreshing it would be to him to see, just for once, great masses of black clouds gathering over the Arabian Hills, to see the lightnings flash as he has seen them in his native Ohio, and to hear the thunder-peals rolling across the valley from mountain to mountain, and at last dying away on the Libyan desert.

      Think of this, ye who shiver in your winter storms at home, and sigh for Egypt. Take it all in all, would you make the exchange?

      CHAPTER III

THE TEMPLES OF EGYPT – DID MOSES GET HIS LAW FROM THE EGYPTIANS?

      In the distribution of the monuments of Egypt, it is a curious fact that the Pyramids are found almost wholly in Lower Egypt, and the great Temples in Upper Egypt. It was not till we had been a week on the Nile, that we had our first sight of the latter at Denderah. We have since spent three days at Thebes, the great centre of historical interest, and have made a regular campaign of sight-seeing, starting on excursions every morning, and thus have explored the ruins on both sides of the river – for Thebes, like many other great cities – like London and Paris – was built on two sides of a river, but one much greater than the Thames or the Seine, yet not so great but that it was spanned by a bridge (at least this is inferred from some ancient sculptures and inscriptions), over which poured a population such as pours over London Bridge to-day. The site seems made for a great capital, for here the mountains retire from the river, sweeping round in a circuit of some fifty miles, leaving a broad plain to be filled with human habitations. Here four thousand years ago was built a city greater than that on the banks of the Tigris or the Euphrates, than Nineveh or Babylon. Here was the centre of power and dominion for two continents – not only for Africa, but for Asia – to which flocked the multitudinous nations of Assyria and Arabia and Persia and the farthest East, as well as the tribes of Ethiopia – as two thousand years later all the peoples of the earth flocked to Rome. It is easy, from historical records and monumental inscriptions, to form some idea of the glory of this capital of the ancient world. We can imagine the tumult and the roar of this more ancient Rome, when the chariots of mighty kings, and the tread of armies returning victorious from distant wars, thundered through her hundred gates.

      Then did the kings of Egypt rear temples and palaces and statues and obelisks worthy of all that greatness. Then were built the most gigantic temples ever raised by the hand of man – as much surpassing in vastness and grandeur those reared centuries afterward by the Greeks, as the latter surpass anything by the moderns. The temples of Thebes – including Luxor and Karnac, which are parts of one city – are as much grander than the Parthenon, as the Parthenon is grander than the Madeleine at Paris, which is a feeble attempt to copy it.

      We have now been a week – beginning with Denderah – studying these ruins, and may give certain general impressions. We do not attempt any detailed description, which must necessarily be inadequate, since neither words nor figures convey an idea of them, any more than they do of the Alps. What would be thought of an avenue nearly two miles long, lined with over twelve hundred colossal sphinxes? Yet such was the avenue from Luxor to Karnac – an approach worthy to lead to the temple of the gods. What can we say of a forest of columns, each twelve feet in diameter, stretching out in long colonnades; of the massive walls covered with bas-reliefs; and obelisks in single shafts of granite, of such height and weight that it is the wonder of modern engineering how they could be cut from the side of the hills, and be brought a hundred and forty miles, and erected on their firm bases.

      But this temple – or rather cluster of temples and palaces – was not, like the temple of Solomon, finished in a single reign. Karnac was not the work of one man, or of one generation. It was twenty-five hundred years in building, successive kings and dynasties adding to the mighty whole, which was to represent all the glory of Egypt.

      The general impression of these temples – and the same is true of the Egyptian statues and sculptures – is one of grandeur rather than beauty. They seek to overpower the senses by mere size. Sometimes they overdo the matter. Thus in the temples at Karnac the columns seem to me too large and too much crowded for the best effect. Ordinary trees may be planted in a dense grove, but great, broad-spreading oaks or elms require space around them; and if these columns were a little more spaced– to use a printer's word – the architectural effect would be still grander. So in the Egyptian sculpture, everything СКАЧАТЬ